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The Radical Sixties at York, c.1966-1972
June 19, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
FREE but booking with eventbrite is requiredEvent details
Britain’s ‘Swinging Sixties’ continue to be viewed as a metropolitan world peopled by Carnaby Street Mods, the Beatles, and countercultural music venues like the UFO Club.
However, historian David Fowler of the University of York will argue that university students and dons, well beyond London, were the prime movers in the cultural revolution of the ‘Long 1960s’. He will do this through an exploration of student and don radicalism at York; one of the first ‘new universities’ of the 1960s.
The key protagonists in this educational and cultural experiment at York were a generation of edgy, politically conscious, entrepreneurial and countercultural student activists; a number of whom subsequently became distinguished journalists, cultural leaders, writers and ‘Public Intellectuals’ who shaped not only a pioneering campus university of the 1960s but the wider culture beyond the University.
How did this happen? What has subsequently happened to student and don radicalism (at York and other British universities) since the 1960s?
Image: Striking students are front page news in The Yorkshire Evening Press on 22 February 1967.
Please note: This talk will not be available on YouTube afterwards, so be sure to book a ticket to our live event to avoid missing out.
This event is hosted live on Zoom Webinar. You’ll receive a link to join a couple of days before the event takes place and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Image credits: Student protest in York City centre on Wednesday 22 February 1967. Image courtesy of Simon Maddison; Front page of the Yorkshire Evening Press courtesy of the Press newspaper.
About the speaker
David Fowler of Clare Hall Cambridge is an Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of History at the University of York and is conducting a major new research project at York on ‘Radicalism in Britain’s Campus Universities of the 1960s: Dons and Students’. He is an historian of 20th century British cultural history and has published two major books; the most recent being Youth Culture in Modern Britain: From Ivory Tower to Global Movement-A New History (Macmillan, 2008). His new book, Oxford and Revolution: Student Power, “1968” and a British Cultural Revolt is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. It represents the first major archival study of Britain’s “1968”. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall Cambridge and teaches at the University of Cambridge. Before arriving at Cambridge in 2003, he held Lectureships at The University of Manchester and The Queen’s University of Belfast.